A Bioactive Cartilage Graft of IGF1-Transduced Adipose Mesenchymal Stem Cells Embedded in an Alginate/Bovine Cartilage Matrix Tridimensional Scaffold

Figure 7

Histological evaluation of the 3CI and 2CI implants by the Bern/O’Driscoll scale. (a) Histological evaluation of 2CI and 3CI groups after 28 days of culture. (A–C) Adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells cultured in a monolayer as a negative control. 2CI and 3CI showed the typical rounded morphology of chondrocytes (D, G), as well as strongly positive staining of bovine cartilage fragments for Masson’s trichrome, and also exhibited neomatrix formation with chondrocyte-like appearances (E, H). Interestingly, sections stained with safranin O to detect proteoglycan (in red) (F, I) show for 3CI a dense neomatrix formation that is strongly stained (I) (scale bar: 50 μm). (b) Heat map generated by unsupervised clustering analysis programming in R. The intensity of color varies according to a given value criterion, and similar color patterns are grouped together. Strong colors (red) show a greater similarity to the natural cartilage tissue. (c) Histological analysis by the Bern/O’Driscoll score. The summation of parameters evaluated for each experimental group show that 3CI was more similar to natural cartilage tissue in comparison with 2CI () as evidenced by the Wilcoxon test for nonparametric data.

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